Category Archives: Visio Stencil

Looking at the success of the Skype for Business 2015 Visio Stencil I realize that I haven’t updated it since its release in March 2015. As of today its just a few downloads shy of 16,000! That’s certainly exceeded expectations.

Like this:

I do love a creative Visio. Don’t like that bland black and white stuff. In any event, I find that mostly my customers need me to explain some of the call flows, web chat, mail queuing etc. That’s primarily because its really complex and at times hard to tell what’s what.

A picture paints a thousand words and so the contact centre stencil is given life.

What do you call the collection of all the add-on items one can add to a Skype for Business solution?

Additive? Add-On? Supplement? Additions? I prefer bells and whistles, its descriptive and yet so elusive.

Every Skype for Business solution has some sort of bell and\or whistle. Be that some sort of video conferencing solution, Contact Center or IP Phone. What I find difficult is clearly representing these when architecting an environment in Visio. Wouldn’t it be useful to have all these sorts of supplemental components were in a visio stencil for quick access. And so the stencil is born. The theme is based on the same theme used through the Skype for Business 2015 – Visio Stencil (an updated V2.0 will be out soon)

I have also added a second shape for most of the products in the template. The reason for this is that often a Visio is used on larger screens that afford a little more detail.

In some instances I have added additional shapes for the sake of variety of choice. For example:

And of course a special mention for all the really cool endpoints, such as :-

If you have any additional requests (or corrections.. I don’t actually know all of these products intimately) please do reach out to me.